7 Comments

Hi Chris, congrats on the profitability! I was actually thinking about Gliffy the other day and wondering how you guys were doing revenue-wise. Are you making your user-base numbers public? Where are you getting most of your users from? AdWords? Word of mouth? Getting interviewed for articles? ;)

Thanks Michael! I’ve been following your work, and I’m looking forward to seeing Pudding. What flavor did you settle on anyway? :)

Our registered user base is just shy of 100K since we launched May 22, 2006. We are definitely getting most of our traffic through word of mouth. Blogs account for a considerable amount of our traffic. We also get some very decent traffic by way of Stumble Upon and Del.icio.us. Curiously, that article didn’t draw much traffic relative to other sources… which quite frankly surprised me. I think Network World has a larger print following though, so we’ll see if/when the print article rolls out.

ha ha! I haven’t picked any particular flavors other than Vanilla & Chocolate! As soon as I get my business accounts setup I’ll be launching a private beta. (Hopefully this month, but it might spill into the first week of next month.)

Wow, just as my development team was getting used to Gliffy as a Visio alternative, between yesterday and today it went from freeware to nagware/gimpware overnight. “Upgrade Now” banners all over the place, Gliffy ads glommed on to exported images (we sure can’t show those to our customers anymore), the limitation on 3 private documents (What’s a public document anyway? Can I go browsing around others’ stuff now?), etc. It stings a bit to look at the comparison chart between “Basic” and “Premium” and see features in the Premium category today that I was counting on yesterday.

I’m sure the obvious response is “We have a right to make money off our hard work; if you want to use Gliffy, go ahead and buy it.” I will definitely give you props for what you’ve created; Gliffy has the most functionality out of any of the Visio alternatives we’ve tried, and being web-based is major cool, but it has some noticeable bugs (some of which may really be Flash limitations) and only supports a small subset of Visio’s functionality. I can’t justify the expense when there are other Open Source alternatives available with almost the same level of functionality. Since the “commercial-ness” is impairing our use of Gliffy and we don’t plan to pay for unhindered usage, our team will be using OpenOffice Draw diagrams checked into Subversion for our shared diagramming in the future.

Thanks for the comments. I understand where you’re coming from, and I’d like to respond.

Gliffy Inc. has not raised any funding since our inception in May 2005. What that means is that the product you see today was created primarily through the personal savings of Clint and myself, and to a much lesser extent our other 2 original co-founders who are no longer with the company. In the last 6-8 months, money started to become a problem for us, and that left us with a few uncomfortable choices which would have either forced us to shut down Gliffy or stop supporting and enhancing it. At the end of the day, servers, rent, and food all cost money, and we simply cannot afford to continue supporting this product for free. Thanks to our wonderful customers, I’m happy to report that through the Confluence Plugin and now through Premium Gliffy Online, we are becoming a sustainable company and have the ability to continue to add features and improve the overall quality of the product.

If you have constructive feedback in regards to our pricing model, I would very much appreciate it. I’ll be posting again to the blog shortly describing our rational for our model, and that would be the best place to respond.